


Major Character Death

by deepandlovelydark



Series: Second Chances [36]
Category: MacGyver (TV 1985)
Genre: Angst, Death, Deathfic, Grief/Mourning, Redemption, Survivors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-22
Updated: 2018-01-22
Packaged: 2019-03-07 21:28:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13443750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deepandlovelydark/pseuds/deepandlovelydark
Summary: Mac and Becky.One of them dies.One of them has to live.





	Major Character Death

**Author's Note:**

> Quite frankly, this is the most brutal thing I've ever written. 
> 
> Just so you're warned.

“One of you,” Ralph Jerico says, “is going to die. But only one.”

MacGyver struggles against his bonds. Duck tape, rolls and rolls and rolls of the stuff, attaching him to a chair that’s been bolted firmly to the floor. 

All he needs to escape is time; but he’s not sure he’ll have it. 

That they’ll have it. Becky is a mere foot away from him, working her way out of a similar setup. 

“I’m insisting on that. Twenty years in prison, Mac.”

“Name’s MacGyver,” he growls.

He has no hope of placating this man; that look in the eyes is the same misery he’d seen in the mirror, one cruel April day. When Jack was leaving and Becky was leaving, and there’d been nothing to stop him doing something despairing- but Murdoc had come and rescued him, then. Nobody will ever rescue Ralph Jerico. 

Ralph hefts a pistol at them, a cheap indifferent model that still bears its pawn shop tag. Doesn’t matter. It’ll do the job. 

“Maybe you kill me afterwards, but I don’t care about that,” Ralph says, with a slow, mellow smile that bears no stamp of insanity at all. 

“Shoot me, then,” Becky says, with apparent coolness. All the people in this world, MacGyver thinks, and he’s probably the only one who’d detect the note of sheer hysteria hidden beneath her professional manner. “Shoot me, and let my uncle live. Every time.”

“Oh, you don’t think you get a choice in this? It’s up to the barista. Only one way you’re getting out of this room, Mac, and that’s if you beg me. Beg me with every bone in your body, tell me how much you want to live, paint me your lust for life in hot glowing colours. I’ll shoot her, and then I’ll let you go. And you get to spend the rest of your days without her. Thinking about what price you’ve paid, for your freedom.”

“Becky…”

She hears the word. Everything underlying it, as well. 

_I’m sorry. Be brave._

_I love you._

“Don’t kill anyone.”

He shakes his head, just once; and Ralph Jerico shoots him. 

************

For Becky Grahme, that’s when time stops. 

Oh, events are still happening. When her uncle slumps forwards, with a bullet in his chest that she knows killed him on impact. When Ralph rips her bonds loose with MacGyver’s knife, and hands her knife and gun with weary triumph. 

When she’s got the monster pinned to the floor, all the habits of a lifetime thrown aside, because she understands now what kind of broken, incandescent rage could drive her gentle uncle to murder; her blood the same as his in the end, burning through her flesh with utter self-hatred and so much pain- 

an SAK is still a weapon, and if she drives the blade through this man’s heart, he will surely die- 

and the only thing, the only thing that stops her doing it, is those last three words. The last thing that Angus MacGyver will ever say to her, protecting her one more time. More than she’s ever needed it before. 

Just as he always did. 

She brings Ralph to the police station, alive (he’s very docile). The usual ruckus explodes around her, questioning officers and the ring of telephones; but to her, everything is very quiet now. 

Jack comes skidding across the floor, with so much fear she can hardly bear it. 

“Becky- where is he? Please?”

“He was saving me,” she says, the words paper-dry as they leave her mouth. 

Jack understands (he always did). Hugs her fierce and close, as though their mere wanting will be enough to bring him back, as though being there for her can substitute for a bond forever snapped- 

“Good enough for me. You know he’d have wanted it that way,” he tells her, through his tears. 

Time starts again. 

And Becky starts to cry. 

************

The funeral is discreet and private. He was, after all, an assassin. 

Murdoc weeps through the entire service, his English reserve utterly shattered. Jack nestles close against him, while spilling out every musty joke about death that’s ever blighted a funeral home. Breathless, thoughtless enthusiasm, with a smile that he keeps up as though he’ll fall apart without it. 

(Sometimes, Murdoc chokes on a giggle as he cries; and then Jack holds him tighter than ever.)

Ashton sits on Murdoc’s other side, distributing tissues and making all the required conversation with outsiders. Bless her, Becky thinks. 

She sits on Jack’s left, there to cuddle him close if Murdoc should need some space (though it seems he doesn’t). Ellen is to her left, in the aisle seat. Still wrapped in her heavy Alaskan clothing, and snapping short at the usher who offers to take her coat. 

None of them actually listen to the readings. Those are for the dead; and they’re the living. 

_Unc, you taught me so much else- but not how to get by without you! What- what kind of life can I have now? What next?_

She thinks of her work for the DXS, and her dabbling with a graduate degree, and the small, perfect flat waiting for her back in LA, and it’s all so much dust on the wind. 

Ellen hisses with impatience, at yet another useless speech of empty words. She shifts backwards, allows her handbag to fall open. There is a gun in it. Shining blue-grey steel, that reflects the harsh fluorescent lighting with cool determination. 

Okay. 

That, at least, is a next. 

************

“You can’t kill Ralph,” she says to Ellen, as they’re walking out of the cemetery. 

(Close enough to the ranch that they can visit sometimes, not so close that they’d want to spend every day there; she and Jack had agreed on that. A warm, wild-flowered place. She didn’t need the will to know that her uncle wanted to be buried here in Texas, instead of freezing Minnesota.)

“I’m not a cop, I’m not a spy. I have no societal bonds,” Ellen says. “I have some dogs I’ll need to see go to a good home, but- Becky, this is my fault. Entwining the family with a toxic man like that- if I hadn’t married him, Mac would still be alive.” 

“Ellen, that’s the same kind of twisted logic that made him kill Mac in the first place.” 

“Nobody will miss him. He’s the most worthless, wasted life imaginable,” Ellen says. “I want to see justice done. I can’t stand the idea of him in some safe jail cell somewhere, gloating out the rest of his days.”

“The last thing my uncle said to me, his dying words, were not to kill him. He gets to live.”

“Because MacGyver loved you. He didn’t love me. I can do it.”

“Then let’s put it this way. If I don’t get to kill Ralph Jerico, nobody else does either.”

“Now that,” Ellen says, after a long moment, “I can understand.”

************

She wasn’t expecting to burst into tears when she walked into the living room; but in retrospect, it’s not exactly surprising. 

“He’s just,” Becky sobs, holding her head against Jack’s shoulder. “He is never, ever going to cuddle me on that couch ever again. I can’t sit on it. I can’t even look at it. I want to throw out every chair in the house.” 

“Sure thing,” Jack says, with quavery humour (he is clinging to that so hard). “You know, I bet we’ll feel all the better for it? After the sitting still we did today-”

Murdoc asks, later that day, where the hell their sofa’s gone.

“I auctioned it online,” Jack says, very calmly. “It’s in the plane, I’ll be flying it to Colorado tomorrow.”

“The price you’ll get for one second-hand sofa will not even pay the fuel costs of flying it there.”

“So what? We can afford it. And I need to get back in the air, before I start-”

“Going crazy?”

“Selling off the whole house,” Jack says. “I don’t know about this place any more, do you? It was Mac who held everything together. Now he’s gone…”

“If you’re going to Colorado anyway, you could give me a lift,” Murdoc remarks. 

“Where to?”

“The Widowmaker.” 

Jack shoots him a look. 

“Can I help it, if that’s what you ridiculous Americans decided to call it?”

************

“This is the first place I brought him,” Murdoc says to Becky, halfway up the mountain. 

(She’s afraid of heights; and in her current state of mind, clean stark terror is a welcome change of pace. Her hands are very well chalked.)

“When we first became lovers, I wanted to bring him somewhere it would be just the two of us. He trekked the whole way up to the peak without a word of complaint, even though,” and there’s a touch of amusement in his voice now, “everything went wrong. It rained. A climbing rope snapped, and he nearly went over the edge. An old adversary of mine showed up with a flamethrower. After a certain point in my career, I was spending more time cleaning up loose ends from previous killings than I was pursuing new ones…you know, I feel positive that this must be boring you.”

“Not really,” Becky says. “I know about nearly everything else in his life, but what was going on between the two of you, I never really got that. And- just now, I’m glad to hear about him. Anything new.”

Murdoc snorts. “I wish you hadn’t come.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’d seemed so- elegant. So simple. I’d climb up to this point, see this whole glorious view one more time-“ he gestures, at the sprawling vista before them. “Meditate on the man I loved. And just let myself slip, over the edge…only you’ve rather spoiled it now. I’ll have to find a different way to die.”

“You know MacGyver wouldn’t have wanted that.”

“The man’s dead. My feelings may not be at an end, but my obligations are.”

“There’s Ashton to think of.”

“Ashton shares my pragmatism- should I say, my usual pragmatism? She’ll mourn for a season, then move on. Heartwrenching, perhaps, but it won’t destroy her- you know it should have been me,” Murdoc says. “Sitting in that chair. A quick painless death for me, and then MacGyver could have gone skipping back to Jack Dalton. Slip into a peaceful, happy retirement, forgetting all about me- that’s the way things should have been.”

“I don’t think either of them could have just forgotten you like that.”

“I do.”

“I don’t,” Becky insists. “I think Jack’s sitting in his plane down there, with his heart in his mouth because he doesn’t know what’s happening. Whether he’s going to get back the one person who understood my uncle like he did, somebody who loved him just as much.”

Murdoc regards her, ungraciously. “You understood him. Better than either of us.”

“Not the same way,” Becky says, her mouth twitching. “I mean, it sure wasn’t romantic on my part.”

“Vile-minded youngsters,” Murdoc says to the air.

“Not just that, either. I mean- years n’ years, he spent killing people in cold blood - that I will never get. I loved him enough to forgive him anything, but I’ll never know how that fit together with the sweetheart uncle who raised me. I think you do. I think Jack does. And what I am sure of,“ Becky remarks, zipping her jacket up tight against the winds. “What I am sure of is that right now, Jack Dalton needs somebody who’ll remember the person he spent his whole life loving. And frankly, somebody to share his bed.”

Murdoc sighs. “He never asked me. MacGyver, that is.”

“Asked you what?”

“He never asked me to stay with Jack, if he should die first. I had to bring up the topic myself. Whether he wanted me to or not.”

“What’d he say?” Becky ventures, after a pregnant pause. 

“That if I wanted to stay, I’d stay, and that if I didn’t, he didn’t want me bound to anybody out of a sense of obligation. It appears he had some strong feelings on that topic. After Ellen.”

His voice is smooth and cultured now, a tone suitable for a light dinner party. Becky manages a chuckle. 

“Tell you what,” she suggests. “Take it a day at a time. Give Jack- a year, say. Long enough for him to stop hurting so much, and if you still need to die- well, we’ll come back here and do things properly. I’ll push you over the edge myself.”

“I don’t believe you’re capable of that.”

“If I were you, I wouldn’t,” she agrees. 

Murdoc slips on the way down.

She puts out her hand, to save him; and he takes it. 

************

Ellen and Jack and Murdoc. All fixed. 

_Who’s going to fix me?_

Becky’s still thinking that over, as she sleepwalks her way through her next DXS job. In the hopes that work will take her mind off things. Distract her from her thoughts; but it doesn’t work. 

In a moment of inattentiveness, she goes over the edge of a parking garage. Falls three stories. 

Everything is colourless now, and she feels strangely incapable of breath- but that’s because her uncle’s holding her tight. There is literally nothing else she wants. 

(Other people are here, but she only has eyes for him.)

“I love you,” she whispers. “I love you, I love you- I missed you so much.” 

“So did I,” he says. “My brave little princess. My own Becky.”

“We’re going to be together forever, aren’t we?” she whispers, thoroughly content. 

He draws back; she lets out a sharp little cry, pulls him closer. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“Why? Why not?” _Why shouldn’t I be dead? It’d be easier…_

“Because you know I’ll always be waiting for you. In twenty or thirty or forty years, I hope.”

“That’s a long time,” she moans, hearing sheer childishness in her voice. “I want you now.”

“But there’s things you can still do out there, that I can’t. Look towards the shore.”

She does; and sees a dumb-show. Ashton- her sardonic good humour ebbing in astonishment, as she falls to a villain’s gun. Repeating over and over again. 

“You can rescue her, if you go back,” her uncle says. “Keep on saving lives instead of taking them. Including your own- Becky, please, won’t you do it for me?”

It hurts so much, still; but cleanly now. A wound that will heal. 

She cuddles him close, one last time. One memory, to last the whole rest of her life. 

“For you, Uncle Mac,” she whispers. “I never could say no to you.”

“That’s my girl. My Becky-”

His voice merges with Ashton’s, as Becky wakes to find herself in hospital. Her best friend holding her hand, as tightly as she’d held Murdoc’s. Pulling her back from the brink. 

And her would-be killer standing by the bed. Practically breathing down Ashton’s neck. 

Good thing she’s back. 

Without her around, this coulda gotten messy. 

************

“You really think you saw him?” Ashton asks, as she wheels Becky out of the hospital. 

(Jack’s waiting at the airport, to fly her home. She’s under orders not to return to the DXS until she’s made a full recovery. 

That’s all right. If she gets really bored, no doubt Jack or Murdoc can scrape up something entertaining for her to do.)

“I know I did,” Becky says. “Not in a way I could explain scientifically. Not in a way I need explained at all. It’s just-” she taps her heart. “I know he’s okay. And what’s maybe more important, that I’ll be okay.”

“Thank god,” Ashton says softly. 

“Or my unc, fixing stuff,” Becky says. Closes her eyes. 

He’s gone; but that doesn’t erase all their love. She’ll be patient. Keep on doing what she does. One innocent spy with an SAK, and a knack for improvisation, and no guns, ever. 

With a few scars along her heart now; but she’ll get by. Pick up the pieces and put herself together again. Somehow. 

What her uncle would have wanted. 

She’s going to live up to that. 


End file.
